Emotional Day at the Hatian Batay

Yesterday I did my workshop about photography. It was amazing. I taught the kids how to use the cameras Centennial donated to the Dream project. Thank you Dean Horrowitz and Ted Fairhurst for making that possible. I can't forget Ellen Besner for telling me the cameras existed, thank you. The kids loved it. I had them on the floor taking pictures, on chairs trying to get up high to make things look smaller and running around trying to get action shots. Some of them got really nice pictures. I was very impressed.
One boy even got a close up picture of one of the Dream volunteers faces as I accidentally stepped on her toe. It was a great shot.
One of them even used the information I told him about angles to answer a question Alex posed in his workshop today about what makes a good picture. I was so happy he remembered.
But that was yesterday.
Today the group went to a Haitian Batay (sp?). It was basically a shanty town full of Haitians who at one time worked on the sugar cane feilds that surrounded the...settlement lets say.
Those feilds are now overgrown and useless. The companies who set up this shanty town still own the feilds so the Haitans can's do anything with them. The feilds just sit unattended while the Haitians starve.
The Dream Project has a montessori school there and a library but in order for these children to continue their education they need identification cards.
All Dominicans need them to, but they are expensive and difficult to get. The Dream project is helping them, but the papers are not the only problem.
The shanty town is in a rual area and it costs a child 100 pasos to get to school. When your family is starving education is not the main concern. They are concerned with survival.
Wilson, a Dream employee spoke with Alex and I through Rachel about his experiences in Haiti.
He has been there twice now to help with the Earth Quake and to deal witht he devestation. He showed the group pictures of burning bodies, lines of the hungry waiting for the volunteers to feed them and the suffering that people are going through right now.
Wilson said that a man who had been taking food from a grocery store that had crumbled in the earthquake was killed by the police for looting.
Within an hour the police had burned his body. That man's family may never know what happened to him all because he was scavenging, surviving....dying.
That conversation was very powerful. It is something I will never forget.
He is going back to Haiti next week to start a new project. He will be helping children in orphanages find their families before they are adopted and taken away forever. Aparently some countries are taking orphans that arn't orphans away. Nobody is asking if these children have families or trying to find the families. They are just trying to help, without helping.
After that the group went to an art co-op, where a woman also named Rachel, who we did not meet, helps women to create jewlery to sell. This is their only source of income.
I felt terrible, the desperation in the voice of the woman outside the store selling the things she had made was overwhelming.
I bought a lot.
Of course, I was lagging behind trying to take evertyhing in and as I was leaving with Wilson a fight broke out.
A small boy, no more than 7 or 8 was carrying a child over his arm, this child was falling out of his arms and a man came and took the small child away.
A woman presuambly one of the children's mother started beating his 7 0r 8 year old boy. Wilson tried to pull them apart and she Kicked him.
After that he picked up a large rock and who knows what he wanted to do with it. Luckily Wilson took it away.
Wilson was very brave. I would never have entertained the thought of getting in the middle of that. He knows the community and speaks the language, but it was intense. I admire his courage.
Ofcourse the only thing I could do was take pictures.Afterward Wilson said it was normal, things like that happen.
Somehow I feel very powerless behind my camera in this country.